idealism, especially the conception of "irony," or the superiority of
the soul over its creations, to bring the poet's egoism to flower. Its
rankest blossoming, in Walt Whitman, would be hard to imagine in another
century. Try to conceive even an Elizabethan beginning a poem after the
fashion of _A Song of Myself:_

I, now thirty-seven years old, in perfect health, begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.

Whitman is conscious of--perhaps even exaggerates--the novelty of his
task,

Pressing the pulse of the life that has seldom exhibited
itself (the great pride of man in himself)
Chanter of personality.

While our poets thus assert, occasionally, that the unblushing nudity of
their pride is a conscious departure from convention, they would not
have us believe that they are fundamentally different from older
singers. One seldom finds an actual poet, of whatever period, depicted
in the verse of the last century, whose pride is not insisted upon. The
favorite poet-heroes, Aeschylus, Michael Angelo, Tasso, Dante, Marlowe,
Shakespeare, Milton, Chatterton, Keats, Byron, are all characterized as
proud. The last-named has been especially kept in the foreground by
following verse-writers, as a precedent for their arrogance. Shelley's
characterization of Byron in _Julian and Maddalo_,

The sense that he was greater than his kind
Had struck, methinks, his eagle spirit blind
By gazing on its own exceeding light,